The "澎湃" project has aroused widespread concern in the industry since its preparation. On the one hand, relying on Shanghai Newspaper Group, a state-owned media crocodile, the party newspaper has a strong nature; On the other hand, Oriental Morning Post, together with Caixin. com and Nanfang Daily, has become the benchmark of journalism with its heavy coverage of melamine in dairy industry.
It can be seen that the Shanghai newspaper industry hopes to achieve a multi-dimensional breakthrough through projects such as "Surging". The first is the mode. According to Qiu Xin's idea, "surging" should become "the first news question and answer product in China". Through the interaction with readers, we can distinguish between true and false rumors and update the verification results in real time. This App released this time has two functions: "asking questions" and "tracking". The former helps readers to ask questions, while the latter facilitates readers to read related topics of interest and follow them for a long time. However, the success of these models and functional innovations depends on whether they can adapt to readers' reading habits and bring good reading experience. Whether readers' "questions" can be internalized as a part of news production depends not only on the activity of users, but also on whether editors have the initiative and whether the management team has set up a suitable assessment mechanism for this link.
The breakthrough of Shanghai newspaper industry in capital structure is also worthy of attention. It is understood that the initial investment in the "surging" project reached 300-400 million yuan. Some from the government, some from the consortium. Hony Capital, a subsidiary of Lenovo, also reported the news of shareholding. In addition, the core member "澎湃" also realized the project shareholding, which is rare in other media projects. It is understood that Interface, another new media project of Shanghai Newspaper, has also found two local brokers in Shanghai to become shareholders. It has to be said that the diversified equity method is the biggest breakthrough of Shanghai newspaper new media project. The breakthrough of this equity model is not a whim. In Qiu Xin's speech at the beginning of the year, it was mentioned that the newspaper group will consider absorbing cultural capital, financial capital, industrial capital and social capital in its future capital composition. In terms of institutional arrangements, we will also consider adopting the core team to invest and hold shares, and designing the structural arrangement of combining stocks and bonds.
Of course, most people are concerned about the exploration of the profit model of Shanghai newspaper industry. Before discussing this issue, the first thing to be clear is the self-positioning of Shanghai newspaper industry. In the previous media interview, Xu Lin, the propaganda minister of Shanghai Municipal Committee, once said that Shanghai Newspaper Group takes overall management as its main responsibility and is responsible for formulating the overall development strategy of the group and the management and operation of state-owned assets. Shanghai newspaper industry owns real estate, listed companies and other assets, which will obviously undertake more profitable tasks in the future.
For the media business, Qiu Xin has a clear plan, that is, the newspaper business will face a "third sale." The first two sales were "selling newspapers" and "selling advertisements", and the third sales were "selling services". In view of this change, the task of Shanghai newspaper media transformation is how to give full play to the core advantages of traditional media, such as rich social resources, information flow convergence and strong credibility, lay out vertical industries under the paper line, sell services to readers, turn readers into customers, and finally form an inexhaustible gold mine. From this point of view, in the layout of Shanghai Newspaper Group, the future role of new media platforms such as "surging" is to gather user resources and undertake the "middle end" rather than the "end" link of the group's profit.
Perhaps, for the media industry, whether Shanghai Newspaper Group can become a model of transformation is a false proposition in itself. Because of its special background, it provides a resource advantage envied by commercial media. Otherwise, it is hard for us to imagine that the "surging" project can successfully obtain an investment of 300 million yuan and 400 million yuan at the moment when the print media is gradually declining. So, what can "surging" bring us?
Bill kovac and Tom Rosenstiel, famous American media writers, wrote in The Truth that in the future, news consumers' demand for news will focus on eight main functions: evaluator, interpreter, investigator, witness, empowerment, clever aggregator, forum organizer and news role model. These functions coincide with Qiu Xin's positioning of "surging". In such a "worst era" of the media industry, it is really commendable to distinguish between Islam and rumors in the incident, which can still be one of the core goals of the reform executors of Shanghai Newspaper Group. [4]